Posts Tagged ‘GCRM Contract’

Sage has standardized on a REST based Web Services protocol called SData. This protocol is documented at http://sdata.sage.com/. As a first step this will standardize the technology that you use to communicate with Sage applications. You will be able to issue SData requests to multiple Sage products such as Accpac, Abra and SageCRM. As opposed to using a different technology to talk to each, such as COM, .Net, Java, Soap, DLL, etc. All the products will still maintain their existing APIs, but they will all add SData to their repertoire. Even if you are a reporting type application, crossing multiple Sage products can be difficult as they tend to use different databases or have very different schemas. SData is a nice way to hide these differences and to provide a single consistent programming interface.

The next step is to standardize the actual data that is exchanged via SData. Towards this end, Sage is releasing a number of “contracts” that can be used to interface to a given application. For instance the Sage Global CRM (GCRM) Contract (http://sdata.sage.com/sdatacust_GCRM.html) is a standard contract supported by all Sage CRM products including Act!, SalesLogix and SageCRM. If someone integrates to one of these products using SData and the GCRM Contract, then it will be very easy to integrate to any of the other CRM products.

The GCRM contract was created by Sage for mostly selfish reasons. Sage owns dozens of ERP packages in dozens of regions around the world. Having each of these create a point to point integration with one of our CRM packages was proving to be a huge amount of development effort. Plus the results weren’t consistent, some of the integrations were better than others. This started as an attempt to standardize what was being done repeatedly over Sage again and again. However as the work progressed we realized there are a lot of other benefits. Not only does this save Sage some development time and money but it will:

Provide a standard interface for others to do similar integrations. For instance an ISV could integrate another CRM package to multiple Sage ERP’s by taking advantage of the GCRM contract.

ISVs will be able to integrate to multiple Sage applications at once (usually part of a suite of products) using only 1 technology.

Using REST based web services is an efficient way to produce a nice lightly coupled integrations.

Each application will still have a native SData interface where you can get at the full functionality of that product. But these standard contract interfaces will make it far easier for ISV’s to integrate their vertical solutions to multiple Sage products.

Many applications have a component of their data that is shared and needs to be synchronized. For instance much of the data that CRM maintains for its companies is shared by the ERP package in its customer’s information. In most CRM to ERP integrations a large part of the integration is keeping this company/customer data synchronized in the two applications. Similarly for an HR application to ERP integration, typically the employee database tables need to be synchronized in the two applications. SData provides a standardized protocol to allow multiple applications to synchronize data in a uniform manner (http://sdata.sage.com/sdatasync.html).

At the core of the GCRM Contract is the specification of how to synchronize the tradingAccount (company/customer), contact, postalAddress, phoneNumber and email tables. The GCRM contract specifies the fields that make up these standard contract definitions (how CRM and ERP expose their native tables) and what the applications need to do to provide the synchronization. In this case the hard part is handled by the CRM application which hosts the synchronization engine. The ERP package just needs to provide an SData feed for each of these tables in the correct format. Then CRM will periodically ask ERP if anything has changed and if so to provide the updated records. The protocol then has the details of how to handle conflicts and how to catch up if one application was unavailable for a period of time.

The GCRM Contract really consists of three parts:

The base customer/company tables that need to be synchronized and the protocol to handle that.

A number of real time data SData feeds in a standard format to access much of the data in the CRM product.

A set of SData feed definitions that allow CRM to provide a basic Order Entry screen, to query pricing information from the ERP and feed orders into the ERP package.

These three parts can be used independently. For instance Accpac could use the GCRM contract synchronization contract to replace the current method and start incorporating CRM data into its own UIs that is retrieved by the real time SData feeds, but then rather than using the CRM Order Entry screen, surface the Accpac Order Entry screen inside of CRM (the quote-to-order feature: https://smist08.wordpress.com/2009/12/17/sage-erp-accpac-6-0-quote-to-orders/).

As Sage moves ahead with adopting our REST based Web Services, SData, you will be seeing more and more new technologies based on this. Generally Sage is looking to develop many SData based technologies that can be shared across all Sage products and can be utilized by all Sage development partners.